@Il Fatto Quotidiano, friday 17 february 2012
by Sergio Lo Gatto

Gruppo nanou, one of the most significant movement-oriented groups in Italy, opens the Motel Project in 2008 and, during two and a half years of intense work, three rooms are produced, considered both as autonomous windows and as organic components of an even more complex discourse.
As a nowhere, as a passage way, Motel as a twist of personal experiences in which only looks, allusions and unsaid words are admitted. Here every permanence is born to be temporary, far from absolute; every conscious contact is continuously subtracted, lined up in a time warp where every rational reference point is fragmented in pieces.
On stage, a man and a woman, taken in the very act of attracting each other as magnets; a sense of frailty reigns over approaches and distances; two more non-characters keep watch over the limit between outside and inside. These human figures cross the space and by that space are crossed; geometrical souls made up by corners, contours, colour stains. They are bound together by a turbid and disturbing relation, half way between the sexual allusion and the scene of two animals prudently scenting for each other. Everything happens under the dictates of a religion of silence, an hybrid form which owes much to dance yet goes deep through an horizontal research path, made up by pure instinct and flesh.
The pace is cardiac and muscular, dilated the value, it’s a sort of enigmatic game of chess between bodies; the sequences are linked by an alternation of dark and light which ravishes the pupil creating an optical illusion of constant sensory twilight-zone. The faces are always hidden, the light cones – focused on marginal details such as shoes, hats, hands in pockets and calves – tells the story of continuous absence and asynchronism. Disturbing laughs and sampled applause come from outside to remark a radically impossible meeting, now that we lost the way in parallel dimensions that look like each other and leave behind small traces, as bones of a dream.
The Anteroom is the ultimate limbo where dream and reality brush each other. Between compulsive and curling up movements, here comes the dance, in the relation between body, object and stage element; it goes on compressing and containing the expression, to elude the surveillance of the rational eye, going over the proportions towards an ultimate validation of intangibility.
This Motel Project is not worth seeing, it is worth living.
Sergio Lo Gatto

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